THE power which exercises the greatest control over liberty
is economic. It often acts through military and political
power,--but it at bottom control by those who
govern business and credit. That is why the industrial struggle, the "Fifty Years War" of Labor and Capital from 1870
to 1920 involved more numerous and more complex attacks
on civil rights than any other conflict in our history. Doubtless, a very small degree of personal liberty has ever been
the lot of the wage-worker. But as he gained education and
began to organize, he demanded more and more liberty to
carry on his struggle for higher wages and better conditions.
The record of this conflict would fill volumes; we here outline
simply the major facts.

The labor movement has progressed along three lines:--
the trade unions, political activities, and the radical propaganda of a small section.

The bulk of the attacks on the civil liberty of the workers
has arisen out of conflicts between the unions and employers.
The concrete issues have been the right of labor to organize,
to strike, to picket and to boycott. The worker needed all
the liberties guaranteed in the constitutions:--freedom of
speech and assemblage, with the use of public halls and streets;
freedom for propaganda presses; protection from unlawful
police and military control; and all the hallowed safeguards
of criminal justice in the inevitable prosecutions for the exercise of these rights.

Against the workers were lined up the capitalist--employer
combinations creating as the workers declared an "invisible
government" superior to the constitutions, that could both

Notes for this page

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.comPublication information:
Book title: The Story of Civil Liberty in the United States.
Contributors: Leon Whipple - Author.
Publisher: Vanguard Press.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 1927.
Page number: 210.

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